


Sherrinford Holmes of Hogwarts

by Dayja



Series: Sherlock meets Harry Potter [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Family, Gen, Hogwarts Letters, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-07 00:23:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6776569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayja/pseuds/Dayja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Potter, also known as Sherrinford Holmes, age ten, finds an owl huddled in the cupboard.  What can he deduce about the letter its holding?  Does it have something to do with sleeping dragons?  And why, why, why can't first years have brooms?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sherrinford Holmes of Hogwarts

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own/make no money from/am not associated with Sherlock or Harry Potter.

Harry was used to finding the unusual when he came home.  Poisoned mice in the fridge, half melted cauldrons on the kitchen table, his old toys bobbing gently against the ceiling…this was normal and to be expected, if not encouraged.  Coming home to find a strange owl sitting alert but silent, huddled in the cupboard where Harry had hoped to find the hot cocoa…that was new.

Not so new, however, that he didn’t know exactly what must have happened.

“Sophie!” he called.  The owl in question was perched regally on a kitchen chair.  She gave Harry an all too innocent look.  “You are a familiar!  You’re supposed to be above these petty territorial instincts!”

Sophie somehow managed to look insulted and stubborn at the same time.  Harry suspected she learned that look from his papa.  With a sigh, Harry gave up on his owl for the moment and turned to the traumatized bird in the cupboard.

“Here now, it’s okay,” he cooed gently, offering a gloved wrist for the bird to perch on.  “Do you have mail for someone in the house?  I can take it from you, and then you can be on your way and you’ll be fine.”

The bird didn’t climb on the offered perch, but it did recover enough to carry out its duty and thrust a thick envelope at Harry, before exploding in a burst of feathers.  Not literally, thankfully; rather the owl made a frantic bid for freedom by launching itself from the cupboard, past a startled Harry, and out the window.  Sophie, thankfully, deigned to let it go unmolested.  In fact, she seemed to be laughing at Harry, who was currently sprawled on the floor, having fallen backwards at the owl’s unexpected exit.

“Oh sure, pretend you’re protecting us when you fend off our mail and our newspaper carriers, but the moment one of the beasts actually dives at me, just watch and laugh,” Harry muttered.  Sophie merely looked at him, but she was still laughing, Harry was sure.  Giving Sophie one final glare and threats of poisoned mice in her future that they both knew he’d never carry out, he finally looked at the piece of mail that had started the entire event.

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting; owl mail was rare in the household but not completely unheard of; usually it came for a specific purpose like Papa Sherlock ordering something for an experiment.  The envelope wasn’t addressed to his papa, though, or even his dad or to Nana Martha downstairs.  It was addressed to Harry.

Mr. H. Holmes  
The Smallest Bedroom at the Top of the Stairs  
221B Baker Street  
Westminster  
London

It was hardly the first letter Harry had ever gotten, not even the first he had ever gotten by owl, but such owl post letters of the past were almost exclusively from the Weasleys, most often around his birthday which was still a month off.  Most of Harry’s other friends, magical and muggle alike, were able to comply with his household’s preference for the muggle post.  The Weasleys, however, seemed completely incapable of adapting, which was particularly odd considering how keen Mr. Weasley was to try.  Harry knew this letter wasn’t from them though without even looking at the envelope or the oddly specific form of address; not only was it the wrong time of year for them to write but Sophie knew their owl well enough she wouldn’t have chased him into the cupboard.

Trying to mimic his papa, Harry studied the envelope closely.  It was made out of parchment paper; old fashioned and heavy.  It felt stiff in his hands, but light and not ridiculously thick, so it probably contained nothing more than a letter of similar material, certainly no more than four pages long but probably more than one unless the parchment were particularly dense.  The green writing on the envelope was done with a quill, or at the very least a calligraphers pen, but quill could be inferred from what Harry knew of glutinic society, otherwise known as the magical world.

There was no return address and no distinctive odor beyond the smell of the parchment and wax.  The wax smell came from the purple seal on the front of the envelope; an H surrounded by a lion, an eagle, a badger, and a snake.  If Harry had ever bothered to make a study of coats of arms, this might have told him quite a bit.  Sadly, and to his Uncle Mycroft’s dismay, he had lumped such things in with the rest of politics as dead boring.

“So we know it’s from someone official or important, or both,” Harry mused out loud to Sophie.  “I’m going to go with official since it made it to our house since all the fan mail stuff has a redirect on it and doesn’t come here.  Merely being important wouldn’t be enough to bypass that.  It won’t have any curses on it either since it got through the wards.  And you don’t think it’s dangerous or that owl wouldn’t have just been cowering from your ridiculous posturing; it’d be dead or scared off and you wouldn’t let me touch the letter.”

Sophie preened proudly at this, as though Harry had given her a compliment.  Harry sighed.  For all she had bonded with him she really was largely his papa’s bird.  Then he contemplated the mystery of the envelope once more.  Thoughtfully, he gave the parchment an experimental lick.  Papa Sherlock often extolled the virtues of this oft overlooked sense when it came to deduction.  All Harry’s sense of taste told him was that it tasted like paper and something unpleasant, leaving him making faces and sticking out his tongue, trying to dispel the horrid flavor.  Maybe licking something that had been carried long distances over London in the talons of an owl was not a good idea.

Of course, that would be the moment that his dad wandered into the kitchen, a curious expression on his face at the faces Harry was pulling.

“I did tell you not to do everything Sherlock does,” he said, correctly guessing what he had walked in on.  “As the doctor in this household, I can assure you licking everything you come into contact with is a sure ticket to suffering some really horrendous diseases.  Now, what do you have there?  Oh!  Is that your Hogwarts letter?  Let’s see it!”

“Dad!” Harry exclaimed, exasperated, while he went for a glass in the hope that some pumpkin juice would wash away the taste of dirty envelope from his mouth.  “You can’t just jump ahead and give your theory before you have all the facts!  You have to find all the clues first!”

“Oh, right, of course,” his dad answered, smiling indulgently at him.  “I’m sure I can’t jump to conclusions that an envelope with the Hogwarts coat of arms stamped into its seal could possibly come from Hogwarts.  And I suppose I shouldn’t let the fact that we’ve been expecting such a letter to arrive any day now color my deductions of what that your letter could possibly contain.”

“Dad!” Harry whined again, this time through a mouthful of lovely delicious pumpkin juice which was quickly deleting any memory of the horrible parchment taste.

“Harry,” his dad whined back, still smiling in that soft way he had that somehow suggested he thought the person he was smiling at was the most extraordinary person on the face of the planet, and that they were also the most ridiculous child, at the same time.  It was a well-practiced look; between Harry and Papa Sherlock it got a lot of practice.  “Oh go on, then.  Impress me.  What clues are you finding out about your Hogwarts’ letter…I mean, the mysterious envelope you know nothing about?”

“I was just telling Sophie that it’s an official letter from glutinic society, of probably more than one page but certainly less than five, as suggested by the important seal and the fact that it wasn’t redirected like my fan mail.  It made it through the wards and Sophie allowed me to pick it up, so it isn’t cursed or dangerous in and of itself.  The parchment for the envelope is old, as I deduced from its taste and its yellowed appearance.  Therefore, whatever important institution sent it must be the sort that hold envelopes in bulk rather than buying new.  The writing is neat, so it isn’t a doctor because we all know doctors can’t write or type for anything…”

“Oy!”

“And since the parchment is old, we can deduce it comes from a place that hoards its supplies.  And who likes to hoard things?  That’s right…dragons.  Dragons hoard things.  But!  A dragon would never ever let someone take its treasured parchment…unless someone snuck in and took it while it was sleeping.  So, now we come to a sleeping dragon.  And where can you hear a quote about sleeping dragons?  Well?  Can’t you deduce?”

“I honestly have no idea where you’re going with this,” his dad answered, his expression serious but his eyes laughing.

“That’s right!  In the Hogwarts’ motto!  _Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus_.  Never tickle a sleeping dragon!”

“You remember the school motto…in Latin nonetheless…but don’t remember the coat of arms?”

“So, therefore we can conclude that this parchment came from a dragon living at Hogwarts, at great risk to the letter sender, and that this is my Hogwarts’ letter at last!”

“…you lost me a bit in the middle but great landing,” his dad said approvingly.  “And now, are you going to open this letter to see what it says?”

“I don’t know.  Perhaps I should test the envelope for chemical reactions.  I might be able to prove its close contact with a reptilian animal.”

“No setting your Hogwarts’ letter on fire,” his dad answered sternly.  “Or melting it or whatever.”

Harry gave his dad a sad pleading look, using his glasses to full advantage to enlarge his eyes.  His dad, unfortunately, was so used to such looks as to be nearly immune.  Nearly.

“At least not before you actually read it,” he insisted.

“Gotcha,” Harry answered.  “Burn after reading.”  And with gleeful thoughts of fire before him, he finally tore open the seal and pulled his letter out.

It turned out his guess of ‘no more than four’ was a bit excessive; it was in fact only two pages long.  The first invited him to attend Hogwarts and asked for his response by owl.  The second covered supplies he would need to attend the school.

“Read it,” he mumbled while he looked through the required book list, “skimmed it, read it, read it, had it forced down my throat by Uncle Sev when I was seven, finished those, read that one repeatedly, haven’t read but I’ve read similar.  Right.  They don’t kid around when they say we start with the basics at age eleven, do they?  That’s fine for the kids who didn’t even know magic exists, but what about the rest of us?  And what’s this about first years not getting brooms?  That’s outrageous!”

“So do you want to move the school to the ‘no’ pile now?” his dad asked, eyebrow raised.

“Let’s not be so hasty,” Harry answered quickly, clutching his new letter possessively.  “I have a lot of friends going to this school. And Uncle Sev teaches there…hmm, not sure if that’s a point in favor or against. But they do have the best quiditch pitch.  And my parents went to the school.  Er, other parents.  You know…”

“The Potters, yes.  And it’s fine if you want to follow in their footsteps, Harry.  They were great people.”

“Anyway, it’s a big decision, and I can’t just throw out schools on a whim.  I have to think it through logically.”

“Very mature of you.”

“What’s Beauxbatons’ stance on first years and brooms again?”

“I thought you’d crossed them off when you saw the uniform.”

“Sometimes sacrifices have to be made in the name of sports.  I mean education.”

“You know, you don’t have to choose a magical school for your education,” his dad reminded him.  “The muggle world might not offer brooms and magic but it does have rugby and football.”

“Uncle Myc does keep dropping hints of schools like Eton,” Harry mused thoughtfully, not so much because he seriously wanted to go there as to see his dad pull a face like he always did when Mycroft started going on about the finest education and the importance of networking and getting into a good university and the like. 

“I meant you could stay on with the local schools,” his dad grumbled.  “There’s no reason you have to run off to a boarding school at the age of eleven.  It’s ridiculous how fast these traditional families want to get rid of their kids.”

Truth be told, Harry wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to leave home either.  The very thought of it made his stomach tie itself into knots.  At the same time, it sounded so exciting, to go off on an adventure and learn about magic in a castle somewhere with his friends, to go to the place his parents went to, to be away from parental control.  On the other hand, he’d miss his non-magical friends, and his fathers, and while Hogwarts was part of his heritage, so were his fathers’ backgrounds.  What if he wanted to become a doctor like his dad, or a soldier, or a politician, or a detective?  How could a magic school prepare him for that?  There were so many possibilities, and he was only ten years old.  All in all, his feelings were very mixed.

“Well, never mind that now,” his dad said, after looking over his letter and supplies list for himself.  “You have a month before they need your answer.  Just in time for your birthday!”

“Terrific,” Harry grumbled, in no way appeased.  “Just in time to alienate at least half my friends with whatever I choose.”

“John!” a voice shouted from downstairs.  “Sherry!”

“Papa!” Harry answered, part enthusiastic greeting, part outraged tween.  “Rule 138 B!”

“Just because you snuck your rule in-between ‘no using the fireplace to roast a goose’ and ‘no making up deductions to suggest Harry’s teachers are about to die’ does not make it an actual rule,” his papa pointed out, his voice growing louder as he bounded up the stairs though still muffled by the closed door.

“My name is Sherrinford or Harry,” Harry insisted.  This was definitely not an issue he was about to budge on.  Not a chance.  His retribution would be swift and terrible, particularly if his papa should call him ‘Sherry’ in front of potential friends and/or enemies.  “I’m not a drink.  And anyway, ‘Sherry’ sounds like a girl’s name.”

“You let Mamie say it,” his papa answered, opening the door at last, with some difficulty as his arms were full of a box.

“She doesn’t call me ‘Sherry’, she calls me ‘Chéri’.  That’s different.  Anyway, she’s Mamie.  What’s that?  Why do you have a box of electronics?”

“I’m going to find a way to shield electricity from glutinic energy,” Sherlock answered as he dropped the box on the kitchen table.  “Glutinic society’s reliance on birds, fireplaces, and mirrors for communication is ridiculous, and its complete lack of computers and internet borders on willful ignorance. What’s this?  Oh, your Hogwarts’ letter.  Well, there’s a good example of why this experiment is long overdue.  Imagine if you did decide to go to that school; you’d have no computer, no phone; you’d be isolated in the countryside where anything could happen and nobody would know.”

“If I went to Eton, I’d have the best technological education,” Harry pointed out slyly.

“Rule 116 C,” Sherlock answered, his voice disappointingly calm as he rummaged through the box before pulling out a new looking laptop.”

“What?  What rule 116 C?” Harry demanded, before running to the bookcase and grabbing the familiar white notebook from the shelf.  Meanwhile, his dad peered into the box with a look that suggested there might soon be trouble, though of all the people in the room only Sophie appreciated it.

“Are these new computers and smart phones?” John demanded.  “Where exactly did you get these?”

“They aren’t stolen,” Sherlock answered carelessly while Harry continued to thumb through the rule book.

“116 C: Harry is not going to Eton and he is not going to talk about Eton and nothing to do with Eton will enter this…hussled…hosted…your handwriting is as bad as dad’s, and you aren’t allowed to just make up rules if I can’t.”

“Household,” his papa muttered and otherwise ignored Harry’s complaint.

“Did you buy all of these?” his dad asked, his voice deceptively pleasant.  Harry knew that tone.  It was a very ‘Vatican Cameos’ sort of tone.

“Relax, John,” his papa answered.  “I used Mycroft’s card.”

There was a long moment of silence, while Harry looked back and forth between his fathers.  It could go either way with this one.  Even his papa seemed to have realized the danger he was in because he had stopped messing with the laptop and was looking at John warily.  Sophie ruffled her feathers, head twisting to watch the impending doom.  Then, John smiled.

“Well, in that case, have at it.”

And the room breathed easily once again.  Curiosity overcoming his indignity over his name, Harry joined his papa at the table again to look into the box.

“You know, mirrors for communication is a bit like facetime,” Harry pointed out as he reached for a mobile and tried to decide how likely it was that either of his fathers would notice if he slipped it in his pocket.  Not that he didn’t already have a phone, for emergencies as his dad had said, but it wasn’t a smart phone; it could do calls and texts and that was pretty much it.

“And if they did texting and internet, I’d be all form them,” his papa answered while thoughtfully prodding his laptop with his wand.  As it was a Hoaxwood wand, pre-loaded with magic and triggers that allowed even a muggle like Harry’s father to do magic, this didn’t do anything.  He hadn’t done any of the words or movements to release some magic after all.  His papa seemed happy with the non-result anyway, mumbling something about inert fields.

“And this experiment can’t be done in your labs, why?” John asked as he started to consider what they might have for dinner and found the mess on the table to be a nuisance.  Sherlock mumbled something about glutinic residue and the benefits of having Sherry and Sophie close at hand.

“Sherrinford,” Harry mumbled, a smart phone safely stashed in his pocket, and he refused to feel guilty over the theft.  It wasn’t proper theft anyway; he wasn’t going to hide it, just hold onto it, and maybe hope this way it wouldn’t be ruined by his papa’s experiments and maybe they’d decide to let him keep it after all, and it was almost his birthday and…

Darn his ridiculous conscience.  The phone went back in the box.  It’s not like he could have hooked it up to anything without help anyway.

“Sherry,” his papa said, and Harry jumped, half expecting to either be scolded for taking the phone or scolded for not being secretive enough about it.  Instead, all his papa said was, “Try to turn this computer purple or something.”

“It’s Sherrinford!” Harry answered.  And perhaps that wasn’t the best frame of mind for trying to do magic.  He swears he really was aiming at turning the computer purple.  He certainly wasn’t trying to blow anything up.  Or for this to somehow send a surge through the electric wire and blow a fuse for the entire building.

And there was definitely no reason why the sudden power outage should have set off the sprinklers.  The computer wasn’t even smoking, just a bit…sparky.

In the end, after they got the power back on and room dried out, after the firefighters Uncle Mycroft had sent over were convinced to leave, they all decided to go out for dinner. 

All in all, it was a good day.  And maybe, just maybe, Harry’s papa would finally remember his proper name: Harry Sherrinford James Watson Potter Holmes.  It might be a mouthful and weird sounding and unwieldy and altogether a bit ridiculous, but it was all his.  It was everything from his past and everything from his present and it was what he needed to take him into the future, wherever that future might lead.  And not even his papa was going to lessen it into something as silly as ‘Sherry’.  Especially in front of his friends.

**Author's Note:**

> Will I continue this story? Maybe. But for the moment, you can consider this a fun one-shot of what a Harry raised by Sherlock and John would be like.


End file.
